Monday, May 8, 2017

How The Islamic State Has Fought The Battle For Mosul, Interview With Horizon Client Access’ Alex Mello

The battle for Mosul is in its sixth month. It is proving to
be the most intense campaign of the entire war against the Islamic State in
Iraq. That’s in part because the insurgents have changed their defenses from
previous fights like in Fallujah and Ramadi. Recently the CTC Sentinel published
an article “Defeat
By Annihilation: Mobility And Attrition In The Islamic State’s Defense Of
Mosul” detailing how the militants have fought in the city. This is an
interview with one of the authors Alex Mello who is an Iraq security analyst at
Horizon Client Access. Musings On Iraq first
interviewed Mello back in 2014 about the deteriorating security situation
in Iraq. He can be followed on Twitter @AlexMello02.

1. Your article noted
that the Islamic State’s defenses in Mosul were different from previous urban
battles like Fallujah. How were they constructed in the city?

Essentially, in Mosul the Islamic State was faced with the
problem of defending a city that was an order of magnitude larger than any of
their previous urban defensive battles. Mosul has an urban area around 170 sq
kilometers, with a perimeter of around 60 kilometers. That’s some eight times
larger than Fallujah, which is around 23 sq kilometers with a 20 kilometer
perimeter. Even Ramadi, slightly larger than Fallujah is less than a fifth the
size of Mosul. Also unlike in Ramadi, which was 90% depopulated by the time ISF
began their clearance operation, about 600,000 civilians, around three quarters
to two thirds of Mosul’s population remained in the city. I estimate the total IS
presence through the entire battle for both east and west Mosul likely never
numbered over 2,500-4,000 personnel, only a fraction of which – probably around
450-850 – were engaged in fighting at any one time. ISIL was thus faced with
the problem of defending a large urban area with a remarkably low
forces-to-space ratio. The assaulting ISF faced a similar problem – the only
ISF units capable of conducting effective urban clearance were the
Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS)’s ISOF battalions, but there probably weren’t
more than nine company-sized ISOF battalions (each numbering around 250-300 men,
so 2,250-2,700) simultaneously engaged in combat in Mosul at any one time,
supported by a number of IA armored and mechanized units. The majority of IA
and Federal Police units in east Mosul were relegated to back-clearance
operations or simply holding down cleared terrain. These three factors – the huge
size urban area and the low force-to-space ratio for both ISF and insurgents determined
how ISIL constructed its defense and how the urban battle developed.

2. When it came to
Mosul the Islamic State reversed its previous strategy of a hard defensive
shell with a soft core. What kind of positions did IS build outside of the
city?

In previous battles for Ramadi and Fallujah IS used up most
of its strength in the battle for the rural outskirts, the “belts” surrounding
the urban areas. We saw this in Ramadi in late 2015 and early 2016, when ISF
took several months to push the 40 kilometers through the rural Fallujah-Ramadi
corridor and to isolate Ramadi city. The clearance of urban Ramadi itself took
only a few weeks. The terrain around Mosul is vastly different and unsuited for
this kind of defensive fight -- it’s mostly open plains with small, scattered
villages instead of dense palm groves, farms and and contiguous low-density
villages. So instead of putting their main effort in the rural outskirts they kept
most of their manpower inside Mosul for the urban fight and ran the battle for
the belts as a delaying action, turning these scattered villages into dense
defensive clusters using IED emplacements, tunnels, and mortar teams backed up by
only a small number of infantry. They also kept a steady stream of huge,
up-armored trucks bombs in an effort to blunt ISF and Kurdish momentum, but
these proved almost totally vulnerable moving through the open terrain and were
mostly intercepted by Coalition airstrikes. In some areas, particularly
southeast of Mosul they also used the villages as anti-tank guided missile
(ATGM) ambush areas, hitting Iraqi armor approaching with missile strikes from
inside the built-up areas. In the southeastern approaches to Mosul, where IS
faced lower-quality Iraqi Army units these defenses succeeded in holding up the
ISF advance, but wherever they faced high-quality units such as the ISOF or KDP
Zerevani, backed up by the concentrated application of Coalition airpower,
their defense collapsed within a couple days.

3. When the Iraqi
forces reached Mosul itself what did they run into?

Apart from a thin, outer defensive “crust” – mostly just a
berm and a chain of roadblocks and defensive fighting positions running along
the edge of the urban area, which ISF managed to punch through within 1-2 days
– IS’s defense of east Mosul wasn’t really wedded to the defense of fixed
positions or strongpoints. Instead the east Mosul urban area was seeded with a
huge number of pre-positioned weapons and ammo caches, VBIED hide sites, bed
down sites and “mouse holes” – rows of houses with holes knocked in between the
walls, allowing insurgent fighters to move rapidly while evading airstrikes. So
they had this entire extensive defensive infrastructure from which local cells could
sustain their individual operations and fight a war of of movement at the
neighborhood level. Combined with the size of the Mosul urban area and very low
force-to-space ratio for the both insurgents and ISF, this resulted in a very
fluid, mobile battle. So for example you had ISOF columns penetrating several
kilometers into ISIL terrain and then getting cut off and isolated in these huge
ambushes. Alternately, you also had IS car bombs penetrating deep into cleared
areas and then detonating on ISF strongpoint compounds where they had all their
vehicles and personnel clustered together, resulting in heavy losses.
Insurgents would also frequently yield a couple residential blocks during the
day then launch night counterattacks, or re-infiltrate into cleared areas and
leave behind snipers to harass the ISF.

4. One of the
insurgents’ main defensive weapons has been the car bomb. How have those been
changed and adapted since the battle started?

Their use of VBIEDs has been one of the areas where we’ve
really seen some major tactical evolution. In the initial phase of the battle
in the rural outskirts the VBIEDs – mostly large, up-armored truck bombs –
proved mostly ineffective, although they did have some shock value. Things got
more interesting once the fighting moved into the Mosul urban area. IS
distributed a huge number of car bombs at forward hide sites scattered across
east Mosul, usually houses or villas with garages or covered driveways to evade
Coalition airborne sensors. ISIL was able to exploit the dense urban terrain,
which dramatically shortened ISF reaction times to stalk ISF columns along
parallel streets, flank them and then close in at high speed and detonate. IS
also started to camouflage their car combs, first by painting them in
dun-colored camouflage to match the urban terrain, then bright colors with fake
tires and windows to resemble regular civilian vehicles or taxis. Another key
innovation was using small, commercial off the shelve camera-equipped drones to
guide suicide car bombs past roadblocks and onto targets using live video feed
and radio.

5. Niqash had a piece
saying in previous urban campaigns the Iraqi forces had left an escape route
for the Islamic State. This was originally supposed to happen in Mosul with an opening
in the west towards Tal Afar. Niqash speculated this was changed due to
pressure from Iran, who didn’t want any IS fighters getting into Syria. How has
the decision to surround Mosul effected the fighting?

On a larger scale, I don’t believe involving Syria and the PMU isolation operations significantly
altered the progress of the battle. ISIL had months preceding the start of the
ISF advance up from Qayyarah to drain their forces from Mosul, and there are
plenty of indicators that significant ISIL elements including leadership
figures and the families of ISIL fighters were moved out of the city before the
assault started. Once the battle started, the PMU advance to isolate the city
by pushing into the historic insurgent support areas west of Mosul in the
Jazeera desert probably did limit some “bleed out” of insurgent fighters from
urban Mosul into the rural outskirts. However, it’s important to note that a
really in-close cordoning off of west Mosul wasn’t accomplished until a few
weeks ago and ISIL still had access to the Mosul-Tal Afar corridor.

6. The Islamic State
is eventually going to lose Mosul. What do you predict will happen to the group
afterward?

That’s difficult to say. After 2011 I was reasonably
confident we were going to see a gradual resurgence of the insurgency, though
the timeline moved a bit faster than anticipated and I failed to predict the
spectacular, wide-scale collapse of the ISF in northern Iraq in June 2014.
After Mosul and the remaining ISIL-controlled urban areas in Tal Afar and
Hawijah are cleared I think we’ll begin to see a gradual increase in overall
insurgent activity. The post-Mosul insurgency is likely to be far more localized
and dispersed. As I noted in an article I coauthored in late 2016, in Diyala
the insurgency has already fully recovered thanks to the poor performance of
provincial security forces and Badr control of the provincial government,
though the ceiling for overall insurgency activity in the province is still
quite low. A more recent uptick in insurgent activity has occurred in the western
Baghdad belts around Fallujah and Ramadi and north around Tarmiyah, though in
Baghdad itself the BOC is doing a good job of keeping VBIED attacks to minimum.
In the longer term the trajectory of the insurgency will depend on the progress
of reconciliation at the local and national level after the 2018 elections and
how large a residual presence Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent
Resolve (CJTF) is going to maintain in Iraq to support the ISF as the fight
moves into the next phase.

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About Me

Musings On Iraq was started in 2008 to explain the political, economic, security and cultural situation in Iraq via original articles and interviews. If you wish to contact me personally my email is: motown67@aol.com